Adorazione del Bambino

No one knows who painted this. The catalogue gives only the year, 1568, and that date sits heavily over the Low Countries and the Rhineland. In 1568 the long revolt against Spanish rule broke into open war, and the Duke of Alba's tribunal in Brussels was sending Protestants and rebels to the scaffold, while religious images were being smashed in the iconoclast riots of those years. Against all that noise, the panel does something plain and old. Mary kneels over the newborn child in a moment of pure attention, the kind of private devotional picture people kept for prayer at home. The painter works in the careful oil-on-oak manner of the northern workshops, and his name has simply not come down to us.